The Number You Never Look At

As long as the number is unknown, it is the size of your fear. A known number is finite, and a finite number can be broken into parts.

Pick the thing you have not opened for a long time: the balance on your loans, a year of subscriptions, an unopened bill, a letter from the tax office, the reading on the scales. Open it and copy the exact figures onto a sheet of paper in a column, with no rounding in the comfortable direction. Put the total at the bottom. Next to it write one line: the date you last looked. Keep the sheet until evening and show it to nobody — today the task is only to see it.

The first minutes are unpleasant; an hour later it usually feels noticeably lighter, because fear feeds on not knowing rather than on the amount. If the figure is worse than you thought, decide nothing today — tomorrow split it into parts and deadlines, that is a different day and a different job. If you could not open it at all, write one sentence on the same sheet: what exactly stopped your hand. That is already half the work.